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Ode to Moe

March 30th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (1 Comments)

I glanced in the fishtank the other day
And was shocked to see Moe belly up
At the top of the tank,
Dead.
How could it be?
Moe was the anchor of the tank,
One of the first four fish,
The mother of many of the others.
She was so big and belly-full;
She took no guff;
Her female essence
Caused two of her female cohorts
To turn into males.
The earth mother of our fish,
The easiest to spot,
The one the kids called out on finding.
If she was gone,
I feared others would follow,
That somehow the water in the tank had poisoned her
And would poison the others too.

I fished her out
And buried her in the back yard,
As my daughter insisted I do,
Horrified at the thought
That I might flush her down the toilet.

The next day, the other fish were still alive.
They seemed healthy, frisky even,
Darting diagonally across the tank
As they chased prospective mates or rivals.

A couple of days after that, I noticed two things:
First, Mini, who had once been the smallest fish in the tank,
Who had begun to flourish when Eenie and Meenie turned from
Girls into boys,
Had become a new Moe, gleaming and plump,
A stately doggish presence around the lesser fish
Graciously accepting the attentions of the flashy boys.
She has so taken over Moe’s position
That my daughter insists I not call her “new Moe.”
She is just Moe now, Mini no more.

Second, there is a new baby linia in the tank—just one.
Did Moe die in childbirth?
I think she did.
Her legacy resides in our tank,
Including this one last baby that emerged from her body,
To carry on in a dynamic society in our dining room,
Experiencing birth and death at the same moment sometimes,
The way it happens all over our world.

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Life, Death, and Polymorphous Perversions

February 24th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

Some changes have taken place in our fish tank. First, the glo-fish. At one point, we had six glo-fish, 2 yellow (one of which had lovely exotic flowing fins), 2 red, and 2 orange. All but one yellow one (and not the one with lovely exotic flowing fins) have disappeared over the course of a couple of weeks. They were too big to have been eaten directly by the tetras. The most plausible explanation I found online was that they died and then once dead were picked to disappearance by the other fish.

At any rate, they are gone. There is only one left, and glo-fish are schooling enough fish that it is recommended to keep them in groups of 5 or more. On the one hand, I don’t want to replace the glo-fish–they are genetically engineered, and who needs that in their fish tank; they are more expensive than the other fish we have; and most importantly, are the only fish so far to have died in the tank. If our tank is somehow not suitable for them, let’s enjoy other fish instead.

On the other hand, that one glo-fish is left, stubbornly hanging on. And it doesn’t seem happy. It chases the barbs and the linia perugae, nipping at their tails. It flits from one side of the tank to the other, a longer, while the other fish congregate in relaxed social groups. Maybe it will die soon, I keep thinking; on the other hand, the longer it survives, the more I fear I owe it to the glo-fish to get it some companions. Maybe if it makes it to the weekend we will try once more.

While we have less glofish than we once had, our numbers of linia perugae continue to incresae. First I saw three new babies; now I believe they have been winnowed to two. I hope this is a sign that the tetras are doing their job. A baby now and then is a sweet, fine thing, but my tank is only 20 gallons; there is a limit to how many linia perugae it can happily hold.

These linia perugae are deceptive in their plainness. Our four original linia perugae–we named them Eenie, Meenie, Mini, and Moe–were all females. Eenie and Meenie were virtually indistinguishable, Mini was the smallest, and Moe was the big fat earth goddess fish who kept having babies. Two are now male. Apparently, linia perugae are capable of such magic. And it makes perfect sense. Moe is the quintissential female–even when there weren’t any males to compete for, Eenie and Meenie had no chance to compete with her. But now, now they are dashing males, flashing their silver bellies like knights in armour chasing the golden barb dragons to impress Moe and her mini mi, Mini. One of them in particular has sprouted a most impressively bold, black upper fin, which he flashes and ripples like a card shark showing his hand.

The barbs are happily schooling with the Linia perugae; the two groups have taken each other up, neighborly like, and jostel together along one corner of the tank when they see me approach around the dinner hour.

The tetras are thriving as well, flashing from one side of the tank to the other but sticking to themselves.

And finally, the algae eating fish, or “allergy fish” as my children call it, seems to have settled in. Occasionally it will chase one of the other fish away from its hideout, but mostly it googles with its goggly eyes and keeps the tank clean. I don’t see any algae in there, which makes me worry it might starve, but since it hasn’t starved I hope that the algae eating fish and the algae have established a perfect symbiosis.

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Fish tank

January 18th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

In our fish tank now, we have the four linia perugae we started with, the first five babies, adolescent now in size, and three new babies.  Alarmed at the pace at which the linia perugae are multiplying, I looked online for some predators of fry, and we now have seven black skirt tetras.  Whether or not they’ll eat newly hatched fry, I don’t know.  They aren’t bothering the three babies in the tank, but they were a week or so old before the tetras joined the community.  In addition to the tetras, we have six glo fish my kids picked out, two red, two orange, and two yellow.  I added six gold barbs (also picked by the children), and one Chinese algae fish, and our tank is a full community.  The fish are still getting used to each other, but their innate personalities have emerged.   The silver tetras, shaped like flat diamonds, with dramatic black fins above and below, police the tank, swimming back and forth in formation, nipping here and there, occasionally shoaling, which I love (I increased the school to  7 in the hopes they would do more).  The linia perugae remain the puppies of the community, friendly to all, swimming here there and everywhere and always flocking over to the glass when they see me.  The glo fish swim up towards the top of the tank, never in any particular formation, although the two yellow ones in chase each other around.  The barbs cluster together, first on one side of the tank, then behind the big castle, then in the center.  And the Chinese algae eater hides in one of the two castles between algae collecting forages towards the center of the tank, its body twisting and flicking up and down as it sucks on the stones or castle or glass.  The fish tank has a castle on either side, both of which have foliage around them; the big one has  a bunch of green that floats above it, while the little one has a different green plant growing in front of it, where the babies like to rest.  And I just planted a lovely silver and white plant in the center of the tank to distract from the heater behind it. 

My father had two fish tanks when I was little; a salt water tank and a fresh water tank.  He spent hours on them.  I never helped, although I dreamt of the fish sometimes, alarming dreams where the fish grew big and leapt from their tanks and crowded towards me.  I didn’t think I was interested in fish tanks until we got one at the request of my daughter.  A fascination lay dormant in me until I started one of these little worlds, so artificial and yet full of the essentials of the natural world; birth and death, competition, community.  As a parent, you impart what you impart when your kids are young, and it’s easy to think that you see while they are young what sticks and what does not.  But here I am, still discovering the influences of my father.   

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New

January 2nd, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

We got a fish tank for my daughter’s birthday and put it in our dining room.
A friend gave us four fish: linia parugiae, unassuming, silver-gray fish
that endeared themselves to me by immediately swimming to the glass of the tank when I approached, just as the dogs rouse themselves from the couches and walk over to me when I come downstairs.

Our dinner hour has become their dinner hour: they bunch together in the middle of the glass pane closest to our table as we sit and eat, eyes goggling, fins swiveling, willing us to come and let loose their flakes. Almost immediately, within days, we became companionable, these linia perugae, native to streams of the Dominican Republic, and I.

A couple of weeks later, my eye caught an extra flash of something in the tank as I sat next to them at the table, and I looked again, harder.
It was another one, a tiny sliver of a thing, smaller than a baby’s fingernail, transparent but fully there, swimming up against the safety of some seaweed. I looked harder and found three more. The fish had had babies. Where there had been four, we now had eight.

How can it be that these tinier than tiny fish, released from their mama’s belly into an environment approximate to their natural habitat only in that the temperature is kept at a tropical 75 degrees and there are stones below and water all around, swim, fully alive, ignored by their parent yet able to swim and find food and grow?

I imagine these tiny fish in streams in the Dominican Republic, and tiny fish like these in streams all over the world, the life in the water revealed in the tank in our dining room, in the babies who, now bigger, swim over to us with their parents in the evenings, expecting their food.

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